Get inspired: How sports boost creativity

Do you know that the philosopher Henry Thoreau claimed that his thoughts began to flow in the moment his legs began to move? I found that mine do the same.

Active bodies think more deeply

Sport is the ultimate creativity booster. You know, active bodies think more deeply. If you are bound on your office chair day after day, all day long, your creativity goes to the drain. On the other hand, exercising trains the brain to find more creative solutions to whatever problems it faces. The university of Leiden conducted a study to prove that. They compared the results of two groups of people – the first group included people who exercised regularly, and people from the second group were not exercising at all. The researchers presented them two creativity tasks and compared the results of both groups. The first task was to describe all possible uses of an everyday object, such as a pen. The second task required them to find the link between three unconnected objects – e.g. hair/stretch/time. It was found that the group of people who were exercising regularly were 4 times faster in finding the missing link in the second task, and found more possible uses of objects in the first task. The results of the study definitely proved that activity boosts the creativity. Watch the full video – it is short, but really interesting. Also, the lady’s accent is rather cute.Basketball and creativity

Do you know that more than 26 milions Americans play basketball each year. Considering the total number of people who play basketball, including their families and friends, it is no wonder why so many Americans watch the NBA tournaments.

Why not join that awesome crowd, but instead of simply watching, be one of the players? I only recently rediscovered the joy of playing basketball.

When I was a child, we used to play every day. We were playing in either our school or in one of my friend’s backyards. And we loved it. Little did I know at the time that the sport I loved would help me in my profession? I am a designer and have to be and stay creative. But often times I face creativity block. There are times when I simply was not able to think of anything new. It was about the same time that I rediscovered my passion to basketball. A friend of mine invited me over for a game, and I was hooked again. I realized that the only items I needed to play were a ball and good basketball shoes. I got these Nike Lebron basketball shoes from after reading the reviews on Fitaholic Gear and joined the party. They are plenty of outdoor courts where we can play for free. The best part was that my ideas started flowing again.
There is one thing to remember though. The boost in creativity does not last longer. You need to practice regularly to keep your creative juices flowing.

Need more ideas? Here is an awesome short film on what inspired creativity.

Removing that unwanted hair from face and body has started long ago as part of the human hygiene. The shaving and the traditions associated with it evolved a lot over the time. It served different purposes as well. From simply being able to feel better to an echo of the men’s social status. The shaving tools changed a lot from the original ones as well. The evolution from simple shaving stones to quality beard trimmers took few centuries. Let us show you how the design morphed through the years:

Stone age shaving

Or rather picking, as our early ancestors have to use tools like sea shells for tweezing their beards. The evidence for this practice are the early cave pictures. You may wonder why they had to do it as we usually imagine our early ancestors as hairy humans. However, during the ice age, their beards caused them much trouble. The wetted easily and once wet, the beard would hold the water until frozen. That is believed to cause many frostbites and shaving the beard was prevention of this trouble.

Later on, the actual shaving appeared. The men used sharpened both as an axe blade and as shaving razor.

Egyptian era shaving

The Greek historians usually depicted Egyptians as really clean people who bathed few times a day and maintained strict shaving schedule. The reason was obvious. Egypt is very near the equator and is really hot place to live. Living with a lot of facial hair was hardly bearable. Pumice stone was used to remove both facial and body hair. Imagine how important shaving was for those people, when the barber’s profession was as important as this of doctors and traders. Egyptians pioneered circular razor design.

Romans take it to the higher level

Alexander the Great troops shaved cleanly like no other. The underlying reason was not to give enemies anything to grab into. It became fashionable too. The circular designed morphed into flattened form and the bronze blades were replaced with copper and iron.

Middle ages take it to the extreme

Being hairless in those times was highly regarded, though it saw some decline. Some churches encouraged the practice to be able easily to spot their members among all the others.

Modern times

It was only after the late 18th century when the first metal sharp razors appeared. Up until this time everyone went to barbers.

But there was one person on this world, a French inventor who dared to dream about men shaving themselves each morning. And he invented the first safety razor by installing a wooden guard on the metal.

After that discovery, the tools of the shaving evolved fast. First it was razors with replaceable head. It took gilette whole 8 years and the professional assistance of a profession to make a breakthrough discovery – the first double edge razor.

After them the first electric shavers started to appear. They were met with limited success. Wet shaving was so darn popular that it was only until 1928 when their popularity started to soar. By 1937 the sales exploded to the ridiculous 1.5 million units sold and a new dry shave market was opened.

Waxing strips and laser hair removal started to appear around 40s. However, using electrical devices was becoming more and more popular until several different unit became part of every home. Devices range from nose and ear trimmers, epilators and beard trimmers, to electric shavers and good old safety razors. They also come in variety of forms, with different options and in corded and cordless forms.

Do you know that approximately 1 out of 12 men and 1 out of 20 females experience color blindness in some form? Do you know how many of the Americans are color blind?

What do you think of when you hear website accessibility? It is more than simply availability. It’s even beyond usability. You may have a design that works in all browsers and looks great. Perhaps the links to your site’s pages are readily visible and linked to the appropriate page, but that still doesn’t mean your site is completely accessible.

How friendly is your site to the visually impaired? Being visually impaired can range from poor vision to color blindness to blindness. How easily can someone with such impairments visit your site?

I have a friend who is an always smiling, young and ambitions farmer. He has a large farm in Indiana. However, he is also blind. He often shares his frustrations over how many sites are completely unavailable to him. We’ve even talked about working together to come up with service offering of testing and improving sites with accessibility challenges. So what are some things to keep in mind?

Building a site that is not targeted to the blind is awkward for that users group. Would you get a pair of comfortable working boots to your double legs amputee friend? Would you give your blind friend a pair of designer’s sunglasses that he cannot see? Sure you won’t? Then why make them feel awkward when they arrive at your site?

Fonts

How are you handling your fonts? If you’re up-to-date with design trends, you use CSS to manage the display of your text. Do you set the font-size? And if so, how? Do you use pixels, points, or ems? Personally, I don’t like to use pixels (e.g. font-size:14px;). The main reason is that this creates problems. Setting the font size like that hard codes the size so that is cannot increase or decrease based on a user’s browser setting.

The two suggested methods of setting font sizes is using em or percent (e.g. font-size: 1em; or font-size: 100%;). I personally prefer the first one. This allows the font to grow or shrink to meet the visitor’s needs. Granted, that does present design challenges: if the font can grow, then what happens to the cool fixed height/width div that contains that font? So your design may require some rethinking to accommodate this form of accessibility. But doing so has the potential of providing a better experience for a whole segment of visitors you may not have been thinking about. See below how large that chunk is!

Colors

Unless you’re a complete minimalist, it’s likely you have color in your site. It might be in your background, in images, backgrounds for headers or even your navigation menu. It’s the latter two that may present some accessibility issues.

Some color combinations are obviously hard to read. However, there are other combinations that may look fine to many people, but those with color blindness may have difficulty viewing.

So when it comes to laying out a design and putting color behind text, you might want to read up on common types of color blindness (e.g. red/green and blue/yellow).

VisCheck is an awesome tool that can give you a snapshot of what your page might look like to someone with certain types of color blindness. It features a very good write-up on color blindness and the accessibility of web pages.

Flash

The eternal debate – “To be or not to be?” /read it “Flash or no Flash”/? Let’s face it, even with tools like jQuery, HTML 5, and more, there still isn’t anything out there that quite measures up to the movie like quality and interaction of Flash. It can be cool; at least in tiny doses.

But aside from not being able to view Flash on your iPhone or having to wait for that counter to reach 100% over a clogged internet connection, Flash presents yet another issue. Screen readers for the visually impaired and for the blind have one heck of a time trying to communicate what content is inside of Flash. I’m not an expert on screen readers, so there may be some that have an easier time, but most (if not all) run into problems. This is usually because text and other content in Flash is not really text and therefore cannot be read.

So if there is a lot of Flash on your page, the screen reader simply be illiterate when it comes to your page. Keep this in mind when utilizing Flash for content on your pages. You could be inhibiting a fair number of people from accessing your page.

And apparently not all hope is lost. According to Adobe, there are ways to make Flash content accessible. You can go to their website to find out more. And WebAIM (Web Accessibility In Mind) also has something to say on the matter.

My take here is: Avoid FLASH! Let me repeat: AVOID IT

Conclusion

While not always the case, the purpose of a website is to attract visitors and disperse information to those visitors (whether it be for a product, service, entertainment, or something else). Considering that the American Foundation for the Blind shows 2012 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) Report that an estimated 20.6 million adult Americans (or nearly 10% of all adult Americans) fall into a visual impaired category. The number is astonishing, right! These are 10% – a large chunk of potential visitors you should keep in mind. You may never be able to get it absolutely perfect – shoot for a balance between cool design and visual accessibility, but every step helps.
So, you’ve just read our opinion on the matter. It by no means is a comprehensive post on accessibility. Maybe just the tip of the iceberg. So, feel free to share your own observations on the topic in the comments below!

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